For first time Newsela educators

Nicole Boyle
February 26, 2018 14:57

Have you been asked to show other educators at your school how to get up and running with Newsela? Below are a few different ways you can help your teachers get started with Newsela broken up by how much time you may have.

Explaining Newsela PRO in 30 minutes

Have all teachers sign up for Newsela and create their first class. To see the student experience, you can have teachers sign up for student accounts as well (they can always delete it later). This will show teachers how students need to add the Sign Up code in order to make a Newsela Account. Once students have made one account, they can add other teachers’ codes. To try this out during a session, have each teacher log into their student account and add the Sign Up code of the teacher sitting next to them. If they want to see more information, play this short video. (10 minutes)

Try one of the features with your teachers. The annotations and highlighting feature catches teachers’ attention as they can click and drag over a portion of the text. This allows teachers to write text based questions to their students and for their students to respond right back to them in real time. Be sure that they click “Share” to make it visible. (5 minutes).

To see more about annotations or our other features, encourage teachers to check out our feature videos. If they have questions they can join the Newsela Community by following us on Twitter @Newsela or joining our Facebook group.

Explain Newsela PRO in 60 minutes

Have all teachers sign up for Newsela and create their first class. To see the student experience, you can have teachers sign up for student accounts as well (they can always delete it later). This will show teachers how students need to add the Sign Up code in order to make a Newsela Account. Once students have made one account, they can add other teachers’ codes. To try this out during a session, have each teacher log into their student account and add the Sign Up code of the teacher sitting next to them. If they want to see more information, play this short video. (10 minutes)

Try a few of the Newsela Features (15 minutes)

Open an article and have teachers assign it. Here they can write specific instructions to their students that will pop up to students on the article.

Click on the Write icon and edit your first Write prompt by clicking the blue pencil to the right of the prompt.

Place some probing questions on the article by clicking and dragging over a portion of the text. This is a great time to establish an annotation strategy with the different colors.

Explore the Binder with your teachers. Encourage them to check out the three main views of the Binder (Assignments, Classes, and Student Progress). Show them how to filter the Binder based on what they would like to see and have them look for the article they just assigned. (10 minutes)

Have all teachers select a Text Set and customize it for their students by adding or deleting articles. Then, have teachers share their customized Text Set with one of their colleagues or post it to the entire Newsela Educator Community through Twitter or Facebook. (10 minutes)

Helpful Tips

If your school has Google Apps for Education, both teachers and students can sign up using Google Single Sign On. The key to success is that teachers and students both sign up with Google right from the beginning of the school year.

Set up a system at your school so that all students make their accounts in one class. Then in other classes, they will just add that teacher’s Sign Up code. This will ensure that all students only have one Newsela Account.